Platform LSF Administration Guide Version 6.2

About Interactive Jobs
Administering Platform LSF
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About Interactive Jobs
It is sometimes desirable from a system management point of view to control all
workload through a single centralized scheduler.
Running an interactive job through the LSF batch system allows you to take advantage
of batch scheduling policies and host selection features for resource-intensive jobs. You
can submit a job and the least loaded host is selected to run the job.
Since all interactive batch jobs are subject to LSF policies, you will have more control
over your system. For example, you may dedicate two servers as interactive servers, and
disable interactive access to all other servers by defining an interactive queue that only
uses the two interactive servers.
Scheduling policies
Running an interactive batch job allows you to take advantage of batch scheduling
policies and host selection features for resource-intensive jobs.
An interactive batch job is scheduled using the same policy as all other jobs in a queue.
This means an interactive job can wait for a long time before it gets dispatched. If fast
response time is required, interactive jobs should be submitted to high-priority queues
with loose scheduling constraints.
Interactive queues
You can configure a queue to be interactive-only, batch-only, or both interactive and
batch with the parameter INTERACTIVE in
lsb.queues.
See the Platform LSF Reference for information about configuring interactive queues
in the
lsb.queues file.
Interactive jobs with non-batch utilities
Non-batch utilities such as lsrun, lsgrun, etc., use LIM simple placement advice for
host selection when running interactive tasks. For more details on using non-batch
utilities to run interactive tasks, see “Running Interactive and Remote Tasks” on
page 529.